Peterson: Forget the Imperial Sugar blast? Never

Five years ago Thursday, the Imperial Sugar Co. refinery in Port Wentworth blew up and burned.

The inferno killed 14 people and sent 36 more to hospitals, where victims — some with burns over 80 percent of their bodies — stayed as long as six months.

All because the company cut corners to save money, concluded federal officials who conducted a major probe and fined Imperial Sugar $4 million.

Although lawsuits against other parties drag on, most litigation against the company has been settled. Payouts remain secret, but likely totaled tens of millions of dollars.

There once was talk of federal criminal prosecution. At one point, even then-Sen. Barack Obama suggested that mere fines weren’t enough. But the feds’ prosecutorial radar seems locked on other targets these days. Imperial likely will skate, victims lawyer Mark Tate lamented last week.

Former Imperial employee Charles Johnson thinks that’s unacceptable.

“(T)he Justice Department,” Johnson wrote in a recent letter to the editor of the Savannah Morning News, “should charge someone with manslaughter or worse. Someone should be held accountable … .”

He’s right.

Ignore the claim by then-CEO John Sheptor — who has a degree in chemical engineering — that he was unaware until the disaster that sugar could explode. Imperial officials knew for more than a decade about the risks of combustible sugar dust, which fueled the conflagration. As long ago as 1998, a smaller blast maimed a worker and hurt two others at an Imperial plant in Texas.

Corporate brass discussed the hazards and ordered up studies. But they still neglected basic safety programs such as fire drills and alarms. And they continued to let sugar pile up — often knee high — and cloud the air with dust at Port Wentworth.

Prodded by the feds, Imperial took a harder look at the dust issue in 2007. It was too little, too late. Moreover, company executive Graham Graham testified later that his proposals to shut the plant down and clean it up went unheeded.

Significantly, the company didn’t formally deny it was at least partly to blame for what followed.

Instead, it cited legal technicalities to support its contention that it wasn’t legally liable.

It already had launched a full-court press to protect its image. It leaned on employees not to say anything about the conflagration and hired Edelman — a giant international public relations firm with a specialty in “crisis management” — to hone its talking points.

It also recruited Sen. Saxby Chambliss, to whom it had given thousands of dollars in campaign cash. Chambliss tried to talk victims out of suing and badgered Graham — who’d become a whistle-blower witness — at a Senate hearing.

In addition to trying to shift blame to Graham, the company attacked the news media. In a legal motion to try lawsuits outside Chatham County, it said bad publicity prevented a fair trial here.

It cited 34 of my articles as the “clearest reason” why the cases should be heard somewhere else.

The motion said they were “often inaccurate” and “plainly one-sided.” It offered no evidence that any were inaccurate, but many indeed were one-sided.

And with good reason. Through Edelman, Imperial routinely stonewalled, responding to allegations with long-winded, almost identically worded statements.

You could boil them down to two words: No comment.

Congressional legislation to tighten federal combustible dust rules stalled. A similar effort by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is meandering through the bureaucratic maze.